The Indian Clerk Read Free Page A

the raw?
     A crude way of putting it. Still . . .
    By his own admission, Hardy has been lucky. As he is perfectly happy to tell anyone, he comes from humble people. One of his
     grandfathers was a laborer and foundryman, the other the turnkey at Northampton County Gaol. (He lived on Fetter Street.)
     Later this grandfather, the maternal one, apprenticed as a baker. And Hardy—he really is perfectly happy to tell anyone this—would
     probably be a baker himself today, had his parents not made the wise decision to become teachers. Around the time of his birth
     Isaac Hardy was named bursar at Cranleigh School in Surrey, and it was to Cranleigh that Hardy was sent. From Cranleigh he
     went on to Winchester, from Winchester to Trinity, slipped through doors that would normally have been shut to him because
     men and women like his parents held the keys. After that, nothing impeded his ascent to exactly the position he dreamed of
     occupying years ago, and which he deserves to occupy, because he is talented and has worked hard. And now here is a young
     man, living somewhere in the depths of a city the squalor and racket of which Hardy can scarcely imagine, who appears to have
     fostered his gift entirely on his own, in the absence of either schooling or encouragement. Genius Hardy has encountered before.
     Littlewood possesses it, he believes, as does Bohr. In both their cases, though, discipline and knowledge were provided from
     early on, giving genius a recognizable shape. Ramanujan's is wild and incoherent, like a climbing rose that should have been
     trained to wind up a trellis but instead runs riot.
    A memory assails him. Years before, when he was a child, his school held a pageant, an "Indian bazaar," in which he played
     the role of a maiden draped in jewels and wrapped in some Cranleigh school version of a sari. A friend of his, Avery, was
     a knife-wielding Gurkha who threatened him . . . Odd, he hasn't thought of that pageant in ages, yet now, as he remembers
     it, he realizes that this paste and colored-paper facsimile of the exotic east, in which brave Englishmen battled natives
     for the cause of empire, is the image his mind summons up every time India is mentioned to him. He can't deny it: He has a
     terrible weakness for the gimcrack. A bad novel determined his career. In the ordinary course of things, Wykehamists (as Winchester
     men were called) went to New College, Oxford, with which Winchester had close alliances. But then Hardy read A Fellow of Trinity, the author of which, "Alan St. Aubyn" (really Mrs. Frances Marshall), described the careers of two friends, Flowers and Brown,
     both undergraduates at Trinity College, Cambridge. Together, they negotiate a host of tribulations, until, at the end of their
     tenure, the virtuous Flowers wins a fellowship, while the wastrel Brown, having succumbed to drink and ruined his parents,
     is banished from the academy and becomes a missionary. In the last chapter, Flowers thinks wistfully of Brown, out among the
     savages, as he drinks port and eats walnuts after supper in the senior combination room.
    It was that moment in particular—the port and the walnuts—that Hardy relished. Yet even as he told himself that he hoped to
     become Flowers, the one he dreamed of—the one who lay close to him in his bed in dreams—was Brown.
    And of course, here is the joke: now that he lives at Trinity, the real Trinity, a Trinity that resembles not in the least
     "Alan St. Aubyn's" fantasy, he never goes after supper to the senior combination room. He never takes port and walnuts. He
     loathes port and walnuts. All that is much more Littlewood's thing. Reality has a way of erasing the idea of a place that
     the imagination musters in anticipation of seeing it—a truth that saddens Hardy, who knows that if ever he traveled to Madras,
     steeped himself in whatever brew the real Madras really is, then that pageant stage at Cranleigh, bedecked with pinks and
     blue banners and